Why does exporting vim as EDITOR in zsh disable keyboard shortcuts?

Question

My .zshrc looks like this:

export EDITOR="/usr/bin/vim"

Now when I open a terminal and enter a keyboard shortcut like ctrla to go to the beginning of the line, it doesn't work. Instead, the string ^A (or some other string, depending on the shortcut I entered) gets entered to the terminal:

emlai:~ % ^A

Removing the word export from my .zshrc makes the keyboard shortcuts work properly:

EDITOR="/usr/bin/vim"

Exporting EDITOR as something else than vim makes the keyboard shortcuts work too, e.g.:

export EDITOR="/usr/bin/nano"

Why does this happen?

I tested this with bash as well, and the keyboard shortcuts work properly in all cases there.

Solution

zsh like most modern shells have a choice between two different keyboard mappings for command-line editing: a vi one and an emacs one. In some shells (like tcsh or readline-based ones like bash), the emacs one is the default and probably the one you expect.

With zsh, you get emacs mode by default unless $EDITOR or $VISUAL contains vi (if you're a vi/nvi/vim/elvis user (though also vimacs and if $EDITOR is /home/victor/bin/emacs...), zsh assumes you prefer the vi mode).

To force a particular mode regardless of the value of $EDITOR, add:

bindkey -e # for emacs
bindkey -v # for vi

or their more portable equivalent:

set -o emacs
set -o vi

to your ~/.zshrc. See

info -f zsh -n Keymaps

for details.

Comments

[zenith]

Interesting. Is there any reason to use bindkey over set -o?